Future Ben

Somehow I stumbled across this beginners guide to transhumanism. I skimmed it. What do you want? I just finished Ray Kurzweil’s “The Singularity is Near” I get it!

So what is transhumanism to me? It begins with the idea that we are less that we can imagine ourselves to be. In Kurzweil’s book he cites how the creation myths of most religions involve humans descending from greater beings. This is a cop out on becoming something greater than what we are. Icarus falling to earth Aracne challenging the gods and being turned into a spider. The ongoing lesson is that ascension will only ever end in disaster.

Through science we have begun to see ourselves as rising from less complex origins. The implication is that we are moving towards a state of greater complexity and something greater than deemed possible by humanity. Does this mean transhumanism is Neitzche’s overman? I’m not entirely sure. The idea is that one day we will all become transhuman which kind of defeats Neitzche’s whole thesis. Or maybe not. When the day comes that a pill will make you immortal the people who take it aren’t necesarily transhuman because suddenly immortality becomes the new status quo. Maybe if you are first in line.

Transhumanism is pushing the boundaries of what is human. So while technology is certainly a part of it, following the doctor’s orders is just being human. The transhumanist was taking the immortality drug before it was approved and then moved on to melding their brain with an AI. In a more modern context the transhumanist must break free of the bonds he or she can which are largely psychological.

It’s funny that at the bottom of this little primer there are a number of links to alternative lifestyle pages. Perhaps breaking free of psychosexual moors of society is the most a transhumanist can muster these days. Yikes! Does this mean that in order to really call yourself a transhumanist you have to be a liberal intellectual smart drug taking body modified BDSM polyamorous freak? Maybe instead of Ray Kurzweil I should be reading Alistair Crowley.

Man I’ve done nothing but crew other people projects for the past year. I’ve been busting ass on the Madagascar spider, Image Node and Tod’s LED sign. All of these are worthy projects, and I learned a lot working on them, but in the end they don’t go into my portfolio. I think I am ready to start working on my own stuff. (Like my graduate school thesis perhaps?) At some point I need to stop being crew and start becoming talent.

Q. “But isn’t ‘talent’ arrogant and generally useless without the crew?” A. Well yes, but usually that’s because the talent was never crew. Often talent is recognized early and saved from grueling labor to live a life of pampering and luxury that ultimately destroys them. But once you have faced all that grunt work that you will one day inflict on the rest of humanity, you feel genuine empathy and are therefore not a total dick.

Q.”Doesn’t talent just party all the time and show up barely able to perform?” A.Of course that’s true, but I have been working myself to the limit and still performing, and the protestant work ethic is anything but punk rock.

Q.”Are you even talented? What the hell do you think you even do.” A.Hey stop yelling at me! I do lot’s of stuff, I just don’t flaunt it. I’m going to go be a mad scientist/dreamer/poet who will resculpt the the world in MY image!

Q. “FutureBen, have you been drinking?!” A. Maybe

Damn that previous post was starting to bug me. I just kept thinking of what it would be like to have one of those magnets implanted and then walk past the 5T line of the Magnet. Ouch!

I thought I might show off what has been keeping me from posting for a month. One of these brains is expressing my in vivo reporter gene in a mosaic pattern. The other is not. Can you tell the difference? It looks OK, and with further optimizing it could be really good. Anyway, look I invented something! Now that is a biological hack!

This is actually old data, but I am showing it to illustrate that my MRI reporter gene I have been working on is ready to go in vivo. Sigh its also a .tiff and I’m too tired to change it tonight. I put the reporter in a retrovirus and injected it into the brains of developing mice I just started my first imaging run on these brains. By tomorrow I will have some idea as to whether this is going to work or not. If that is the case then I will be doing very well and I will definitely have something to brag about at the upcoming ISMRM conference in Berlin in May.

The pendulum of mental ability swings back towards science for a while. That’s how things work for me. I just wish I could make the transition more freely. All art projects are brutally dropped for my big breakthough, but I can’t just not show up to the lab on days when I’m not feeling it. Someday futureBen someday.

I have begun experimenting on animals. I didn’t plan on things working out like this, they just did. If I want to manipulate genes I have to use a model organism. Mice seem to be the most relevant and so…

To work with animals you have to be detached, calculating and, most importantly, merciless. I am none of these things, and so I am not very good at animal work. I can barely pick up the little creatures and yet I am going to have to do surgery on them. Lots of surgery.

Mostly I am just watching my advisor carve up mice and inject my viral particles into their embryos, but I am going to have to figure this out eventually. Today I sutured a dead mouse and practiced loading up needles. I felt a horror movie antagonist. Stitching up a dead animal filling tiny glass needles all for some senseless purpose no normal human mind could interpret. I may start opening up pregnant mice, imaging them and then stitching them back up again just to practice. Sacraficing mice for practice! Is this who I am? Apparently so.

Because I am always broke, I take whatever work I can get. Usually its standing in the Freezing cold on the roof of Rubulad bouncing the drunks, however once in a while I get to do something interesting. Twin A, who generally kicks ass in all things blinky has been assisting artist and head of Disorient, Leo Villareal. Despite being some of the most polished LED art I have ever seen, Leo’s projects continue to grow in complexity. In this case 2400 points of complexity. Somebody has to stick all those lights up in their housing. That someone is futureBen.

OK, it isn’t the most exciting work in the world to unscrew tiny little lightbulbs, but any opportunity to work for an artist of Leo’s caliber is a welcome one. And as always, I am always broke! Maybe I need to come to grips with my 100$/month Mcmaster-Carr addiction. But these extra gigs keep me going, and I can quit anytime I want.

Everybody knows that I am still nursing my heartache from Illegal Human Remains Girl, but maybe, just maybe lightning does strike twice. I got tired of online personals, maybe my standards were to high, but nobody seemed all that interesting. Then one day a friend, well more of an aquaintence that I had just met on the street, and by “met” I mean “I was suddenly accosted by,” gave me an interesting suggestion.

I thanked Sausagehead the raving street poet, but I still refused to buy his crudely drawn comic book. When I got home I remembered some of his more intelligible words and looked up www.feralchildren.com My life hasn’t been the same since. Her name is Ro Chom and she is one special lady. I don’t want to say she is a diamond in the rough, but it’s hard to think of any other metaphor. I have never met a girl so independant and free before, and while I am not usually one for petite girls, she is still pretty athletic. She even likes hiking and the outdoors, but she is still up for staying up all night and sleeping all day.

Sure, nobody is perfect. Ro Chom’s attention is elusive and she has been too on the go for relationships in the past. It’s also hard to communicate with her sometimes, but that is probably just because she lives so far away. Also, she occasionally flees back into the jungle. My friends think that trying to keep up a relationship like this is irresponsible, but I don’t care. I’ve got a crush on Jungle Girl!

After reading her profile I sent her a letter. I knew she couldn’t read or write, but I figured somebody would read it to her. I was really surprized that she responded quickly. The mail sure works fast these days. I guess since she had no other way of communicating she sent me this picture.

Wow she cleaned up really nice since they found her! She still isn’t much for clothing though. That could be a problem if she comes to visit before summer.

I know what you are thinking. “futureBen, we’ve read the news and Jungle Girl is not exactly relationship material.” That may be true. At first Jungle Girl was pretty shy. Even her own father was a little put off, but I knew there was potential.

Mr Ksor told the Associated Press news agency: “When I saw her, she was naked and walking in a bending-forward position like a monkey . . . she was bare-bones skinny. She was shaking and picking up grains of rice to eat. Her eyes were red like a tiger’s eyes.”

So maybe she needs to eat a bit more. Lots of girls have a negative self image when they are younger, or maybe it was just her highly active lifestyle. Still, tiger eyes…Mee-ow!

What really sealed the deal was the first letter I got from her.
She is so expressive!

People have suggested she might be a little inexperienced for me, but let’s be clear here. Jungle Girl is 27 and despite being feral she is not exactly untouched by man.

Sketchy reports from the remote area suggest that the woman lived wild and alone for years. But according to another report yesterday she had been with a naked male companion, who was armed with a machete when she was caught. She had marks on her arm from being bound, suggesting that she might have been kidnapped and kept for years as a slave.

I’m no one to judge her lifestyle choice. She would fit right in at Burning Man. Honestly, we have all had are share of crazy relationships, and maybe, just maybe together we can leave behind the heartaches of the past and share something real.

Well that wasn’t so bad. I can’t get back futureben.org yet, but thanks to the find and replace feature of text edit I pretty easily converted the old database to futureben.net. Interestingly enough the only thing that didn’t back up was the look of the site. Another vestige of the past is shed. I feel so clean. Now how do I get my google standing up for futureben.net?

Before I worry about that I am trying to get another site up genosynthesis.org. This one won’t be a blog. There aren’t enough resources for synthetic biology. The point of me doing this isn’t to entertain anybody its a mental focus and it certainly not to be a web designer. I can barely use Wordpress! Futureben is about me. What is the future as I see it? It has been a real help to me. Genosynthesis will be about what I do. Synthesizing genes. I just have to figure out this Joomla thing now.

The existence of my “fucking website” is at risk! Dynamic action must be taken to save the future of futureben! Now I know nobody actually reads any of this, but it’s a blog so I will self referentially blog regardless! The point of this site, other than vanity, is to have some connection to the ideals of communication. Any sane mad scientist holes his or herself up in the lab and lets the layperson wonder what they are up to until the villagers finally come crashing the gates with torch and pitch fork in hand. That’s just not me though. And so, if somebody is wondering exactly where I went awry, here it is as a matter of public record.

So the site is going to migrate to a new home. I would say a new server, but I don’t know how nameservers and such actually work. It could possibly remain on the same server. For all I know they just change some pointers and we’re done. Another thing that may or may not change is the name of the site. The relationship between the current webmaster and me is…not very friendly. I don’t actually own the name of the site so unless an act of non hostility occurs, I will have to come up with a new nickname. How many domain names involving the word “future” could there possibly be?

Hey, facing adversity is human. And triumphing over adversity is heroic, so let’s hope the New Year will bring an even better website than the 15 minute hack job I am currently updating. A note on Wordpress. It is awesome! I do in fact know next to nothing about the series of tubes that make up the internet but I have been able to keep a blog going with minimal effort. I was feeling some anxiety about how to transfer this site but backing up all the files was pretty simple. Really the hard part is going to be setting up Wordpress in the new server space and I think there are about a million people who have done it already. Oh look! You just click a radio button and it installs itself. So easy a biologist could do it. Maybe I can make an actual website next.

Here is to a new year of breaking from the past, finding fresh starts and personal growth. Here’s to the bag of crickets I accidently let loose in the lab just now. Here’s to all of the mice who will sacrifice themselves on the altar of science to help me acheive my vision. Here’s to all of the beautiful and tragic creations that will carry our hearts and minds from the world we know into the terrific and terrifying dreamscape that is forever the future.

Excelsior!

I said we were going to Boston first, but the future starts here in New Yok. This spring will be the groundbreaking of a project to create nearly 1 million square feet of Biotechnology lab space in NY right next to the NYU med center. Apparently they hemmed and hawed about it for years and then Guiliani got cancer and suddenly became very interested in Biomedical sciences. (Funny how that works.) NYU had tried to get the project rolling, but had only managed to get the area rezoned before NYC took the project away from them. Now it looks like it is acutally going to happen.
In addition to providing labspace at rates competitive to Boston, SF and La Lloya, the city is also putting together a sizable investment fund for startups. Hopefully this is the kickstart that NYC needs to catch up to other areas in Biotech. I didn’t plan on staying in New York after grad school, but this might be an opportunity that I should stick around for.